Quinta de los Molinos

This guide to the Quinta de los Molinos in Havana starts with tobacco rather than plants: around 1800, two water-powered mills stood here grinding dried leaf into the snuff Europe's noses craved, fed by the Zanja Real, the stone channel that had carried Havana's drinking water since the fifteen nineties. It follows the mills' fall from fashion by 1835, the site's turn into a summer residence for Spain's ruling captains general, and the founding of Havana's first National Botanical Garden here in 1839. It then turns to 1899, when General Máximo Gómez, fresh off winning Cuba's war of independence, moved into this borrowed mansion, and a young republic never quite worked out where its own liberator belonged.